What do
Adele, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and
Sam Smith have in common? Most of the buyers of their albums are female, according to
an article by Hannah Karp in the Wall Street Journal based on data from a number of market research firms.
While this info is probably no surprise to music execs who’ve inherently known this for decades, the new-found ability to have a greater understanding of an artist’s fans syncs more with the conventional industry wisdom than previously thought.
Take
Adele, for instance. First of all, she’s an artist that goes completely against the grain of what the music business currently considers a pop star. She’s a full-figured women who has a relatively small social media footprint and no bombastic big-production stage show, yet she’s been crushing sales records by doing it the old fashioned way - with great songs and performances.
If you look closely at the demographic profile of her fans though, the sales records begin to make perfect sense.
According to the article, a
Nielsen study funded by
Sony Music found that 62% of Adele’s fans are female, between the ages of 25 and 44 years old, and have children. In other words, they’re soccer moms. What’s more, a majority of them work in the health care industry, drink light beer and
Aquafina water, and are 80% more likely than average to read
Parents magazine, for whatever that’s worth. To take it a step further, 28% of her fans are in the 50+ age bracket, according to music consumer research company
Music Watch.
Read more on Forbes.
